The American winter holiday season is steeped in special spices, such as nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and whatever the hell pumpkin spice is. I guess as part of the never-ending War on Christmas, each year this sensory and commercial immersion begins earlier and earlier. Since these have become old news, I’d pretty much forgotten about the seasonal spicecapade until just the other day. In prep for minor holiday gluttony, I was grinding fresh nutmeg when I made a startling discovery. Nutmeg is not just the fragrant fruit of the Myristica fragrans tree. No, there’s something far more sinister in this holiday staple.

Merely nutmeg?

The ground section looks superficially like an unfused epiphyseal surface, whereas the rounded outer surface is more spherical. It turns out, in the most nefarious of all holiday conspiracies since the War on Christmas, nutmeg halves are nothing more than unfused femur heads! Compare with the epiphyseal surface of this Homo naledi femur head:

This immature H. naledi specimen was recently published (Marchi et al., in press), and the associated 3D surface scan has been available for free download on Morphosource.org for a while now. It fits onto a proximal femur fragment, UW 101-1000, also free to download from Morphosource.

Modified Fig. 11 from Marchi et al. It’s weird that only H. naledi bones were found in the Dinaledi chamber, but even weirder is the underreported presence of nutmeg.

Like most bones in the skeleton, the femur is comprised of many separate pieces that appear and fuse together at different, fairly predictable ages. The shaft of the femur appears and turns to bone before birth, and the femur head, which forms the ball in the hip joint, usually appears within the first year of life and fuses to the femur neck in adolescence (Scheuer and Black, 2000). So we know this H. naledi individual was somewhere between 1–15ish years by human standards, probably in the latter half of this large range.

So there you have it. Osteology is everywhere – the holidays are practically a pit of bones if you keep your eyes open.

A month ago at ESHE and now online in Nature, Proffitt and colleagues describe stone-on-stone smashing behavior among wild bearded capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus). The online paper includes a great video documenting the action; here’s a screenshot:

Holding the rock with both hands just above head-level, the monkey prepares to crush its enemies. Which in this case are another rock stuck in a pile of more rocks.

In the fairly rare cases where non-human primates use stones, it’s for smashing nuts or something. But when these capuchins see a stone they don’t just see a smasher, they see a world of possibilities* – why use a rock to break a rock, when you could use it to break a heart? So this group of capuchins is unique in part because they’ve been documented to use stones for many purposes.

Now why on earth a monkey would use one rock to break another rock is anyone’s guess. In human evolution, the purpose was to break off small, sharp flakes that could be used to butcher animals or work plants. Proffitt et al. did observe small flakes being removed when capuchins pounded rocks, but the monkeys showed little interest in this debitage, other than using it to continue smashing stuff. More curiously, the monkeys frequently lick the rock after hammering at it:

Mmm, rocks.

Proffitt et al. venture that maybe these monkeys are doing this to ingest lichens or trace elements like silicon. This hypothesis merits further investigation, but what’s clear is that these monkeys’ lithics differ from the hominin archaeological record wherein the express purpose of breaking rocks is to make flakes.

What’s striking to me (pun intended) is the relative size of the rocks. These monkeys that weigh only 2-3 kg are lifting and smashing stones that weigh about half a kilogram on average. Because these stones are fairly large given the monkeys’ body size, they have to be lifted with two hands and brought down on a surface, a “passive hammer” technique. The earliest-known tools made by hominins, from the 3.3 million year old Lomekwi site in Kenya, are also pretty big. Weighing 3 kg on average but topping at 15 kg, these earliest tools would have required the same knapping technique as is used by these little monkeys (Harmand et al., 2015).

Why the big stuff at first? Did the earliest hominin tool-makers lack the dexterity to make tools from the smaller rocks comprising the later Oldowan industry? These creative capuchins could lead to predictions about the hand/arm skeleton of the Lomekwian tool-makers (testable, of course, only with fortuitous fossil discoveries). Capuchins are noted for their manual dexterity (Truppa et al., 2016) and have a similar thumb-index finger ratio to humans and early hominins (Feix et al. 2015), although they differ from humans in the insertion of the opponens muscle and resultant mobility of the thumb (Aversi-Ferreira et al., 2014). Maybe these tech-smart monkeys can tell us more about the earliest human tool-makers’ bodies than their brains.

It’s been quiet here as I’ve been moving the Lawnchair all over the place since the summer and haven’t had time to write. Bittersweetly no longer in Kazakhstan, I’ve just joined the Anthropology Department at Vassar College in New York. Here’s a quick, summery summary of one of the last things I did as an immigrant in Central Asia.

Site search: No end in sight

The yellow pin marks the location of our survey. This is very close to the Polygon, a nuclear test site used during Soviet times.

In early June some colleagues and I ventured to East Kazakhstan in search of caves that earlier humans might have called home. Our initial plan was to visit the Altai Mountains, but permits fell through at the last minute. Fortunately, Bronze Age archaeologists from Eurasian National University and University of Semipalatinsk told us of some caves near where they were working in the Shyngystau region, and let us set up camp with them.

Abutting Bronze Age burial mounds and just a small hike to a large recent cemetery, the campsite was flanked by thousands of years of burial practices. Would the nearby caves push this boundary into the Stone Age?

Looking south from the previously pictured caves. Trees mark the course of a braided stream, and in the distance you can barely make out the mausoleum-filled cemetery. Camp is just off-camera to the right.

We found and explored a number of shallow caves in the area, but unfortunately none of these were productive Paleolithic sites. This rocky uplift (below), for instance, was adjacent to a meandering stream that probably gets pretty deep during flood season. The water had carved out one small cave (bottom right), and there was a larger, south-facing cave just above ground level.

The larger cave funneled into an enticingly narrow crawlspace. On the principle of “if you don’t look, you’ll never know,” and inspired by the geological situation of Homo naledi, we figured it was worth at least looking.

WRONG! It ended when I was only a little over a body length in. But again, if you don’t look, you’ll never know. What you will come to know, however, is how many and what size of spiders are in cave; the result is always upsetting.

While the trip didn’t go exactly as planned, it was still highly informative to see more of the geology of East Kazakhstan. Fortunately, we have received funding from the Growth Development and Research Institute of Nazarbayev University, to begin survey of the Bukhtarma River Valley as we’d initially intended. Hopefully next summer we’ll see more caves, exciting finds, and fewer spiders.

I’m writing a review of the “robust” australopithecines, and I’m reminded of how drastically our understanding of these hominins has changed in just the past decade. Functional interpretations of the skull initially led to the common wisdom that these animals ate lots of hard foods, and had the jaws and teeth to cash the checks written by their diets.

Comparison of a “gracile” (left) and “robust” (right) Australopithecus face, from Robinson (1954).

While anatomy provides evidence of what an animal could have been eating, there is more direct evidence of what animals actually did eat. Microscopic wear on teeth reflects what kinds of things made their way into an animal’s mouth, presumably as food, and so provide a rough idea of what kinds of foods an animal ate in the days before it died. Microwear studies of A. robustus from South Africa had confirmed previous wisdom: larger pits and more wear complexity in A. robustus than in the earlier, “gracile” A. africanus suggested more hard objects in the robust diet (e.g., Scott et al., 2005). A big shock came a mere 8 years ago with microwear data for the East African “hyper robust” A. boisei: molars had many parallel scratches and practically no pitting, suggesting of a highly vegetative diet (Ungar et al. 2008).

Stable carbon isotope analysis, which assesses what kinds of plant-stuffs were prominent in the diet when skeletal tissues (e.g. teeth) formed, further showed that the two classically “robust” hominins (and the older, less known A. aethiopicus) ate different foods. Whereas A. robustus had the carbon isotope signature of an ecological generalist, A. boiseihad values very similar to gelada monkeys who eat a ton of grass/sedge. GRASS!

While microwear and isotopes don’t tell us exactly what extinct animals ate, they nevertheless are much more precise than functional anatomy and help narrow down what these animals ate and how they used their environments. This highlights the importance of using multiple lines of evidence (anatomical, microscopic, chemical) to understand life and ecology of our ancient relatives.

According to Marcia Ponce de Leon and colleagues, “Brain development is similar in Neandertals and modern humans.” They reached this conclusion after comparing how the shape of the brain case changes across the growth period of humans and Neandertals. This finding differs from earlier studies of Neandertal brain shape growth (Gunz et al. 2010, 2012).

Although Neandertals had similar adult brain sizes as humans do today, the brains are nevertheless slightly different in shape:

Endocranial surfaces of a human (left, blue) and Neandertal (right, red), from Gunz et al. (2012). These surfaces reflect the size and shape of the brain, blood vessels, cerebrospinal fluid, and meninges.

Gunz et al. (2010, 2012) previously showed that endocranial development in humans, but not in Neandertals or chimpanzees, has a “globularization phase” shortly after birth: the endocranial surface becomes overall rounder, largely as a result of the expansion of the cerebellum:

Endocranial (e.g., brain) shape change in humans (blue), Neandertals (red) and chimpanzees (green), Fig. 7 from Gunz et al. (2012). Age groups are indicated by numbers. The human “globularization phase” is represented by the great difference in the y-axis values of groups 1-2 (infants). The Neandertals match the chimpanzee pattern of shape change; Neandertal neonates (LeM2 and M) do not plot as predicted by a human pattern of growth.

Ponce de Leon and colleagues now challenge this result with their own similar analysis, suggesting similar patterns of shape change with Neandertals experiencing this globularization phase as well (note that endocranial shapes are always different, nevertheless):

Endocranial shape change in humans (green) and Neandertals (red), from Ponce de Leon et al. (2016). Note that the human polygons and letters represent age groups, whereas the Neandertal polygons and labels are reconstructions of individual specimens.

The biggest reason for the difference between studies is in the fossil sample. Ponce de Leon et al. have a larger fossil sample, with more non-adults including Dederiyeh 1-2, young infants in the age group where human brains become more globular.

Comparison of fossil samples between the two studies.

But I don’t think this alone accounts for the different findings of the two studies. Overall shape development is depicted in PC 1: in general, older individuals have higher PC1 scores. The globularization detected by Gunz et al. (2010; 2012) is manifest in PC2; the youngest groups overlap entirely on PC1. The biggest difference I see between these studies is where Mezmaiskaya, a neonate, falls on PC2. In the top plot (Gunz et al., 2012), both Mezmaiskaya and the Le Moustier 2 newborn have similar PC2 values as older Neandertals. In the bottom plot (Ponce de Leon et al., 2012), the Mezmaiskaya neonate has lower PC2 scores than the other Neandertals. Note also the great variability in Mezmaiskaya reconstructions of Ponce de Leon et al. compared with Gunz et al.; some of the reconstructions have high PC2 values which would greatly diminish the similarity between samples. It’s also a bit odd that Engis and Roc de Marsal appear “younger” (i.e., lower PC1 score) than the Dederiyeh infants that are actually a little bit older.

Ponce de Leon et al. acknowledge the probable influence of fossil reconstruction methods, and consider other reasons for their novel findings, in the supplementary material. Nevertheless, a great follow-up to this, to settle the issue of Neandertal brain development once and for all, would be for these two research teams to join forces, combining their samples and comparing their reconstructions.

Today is not like the good ol’ days. In many ways things have changed for the better. For instance, in the good ol’ days, many paleontologists would find fossils but let nary a soul examine them; today, you can download high quality 3D models of many important fossils from both East and South Africa, completely for free!

Robert Broom’s (1938) account of the discovery of the first Paranthropus (or Australopithecus) robustus is also a reminder of the strangeness of the bygone days of yore:

Wait for it …

In June of this year a most important discovery was made. A schoolboy, Gert Terblanche, found in an outcrop of bone breccia near the top of a hill, a couple of miles from the Sterkfontein caves, much of the skull and lower jaw of a new type of anthropoid. Not realizing the value of the find, he damaged the specimen considerably in hammering it out of the rock. The palate with one molar tooth he gave to Mr. Barlow at Sterkfontein, from whom I obtained it. Recognizing that some of the teeth had recently been broken off, and that there must be other parts of the skull where the palate was found, I had to hunt up the schoolboy. I went to his home two miles off and found that he was at the school another two miles away, and his mother told me that he had four beautiful teeth with him. I naturally went to the school, and found the boy with four of what are perhaps the most valuable teeth in the world in his trouser pocket. He told me that there were more bits of the skull on the hillside. After school he took me to the place and I gathered every scrap I could find; and when these were later examined and cleaned and joined up, I found I had not only the nearly perfect palate with most of the teeth, but also practically the whole of the left side of the lower half of the skull and the nearly complete right lower jaw.

What a wild time – Broom hunts down poor Gert, barges into the school, then makes the kid show him where he hacked the skull out of the rock. Poor, poor Gertie.

Maybe it was a different Gertie, but surely the reaction was the same.

Of course, there was a lot at stake. I mean, brazen Gert harbored not just “beautiful teeth,” but “the most valuable teeth in the world.” IN HIS TROUSERS! And of course Gert was also the soul possessor of priceless intel – the source of the fossils. So maybe Broom was justified in this zealous abduction. And O! such prose in a Nature paper! WAS IT WORTH IT, DR. BROOM?

At Sterkfontein, a bronzed Broom considers the weight of his actions.

Of course, Gert wasn’t the last kid to discover an important human fossil. The game-changing Australopithecus sediba was discovered when Matthew Berger, son of famed Lee Berger and only 9 years old at the time, saw a piece of a clavicle sticking out of a block of breccia. Both Gert and Matthew show that you don’t have to be a doctor to make amazing discoveries. What future fossil discoveries will be made by kids, and making my adult accomplishments pale in comparison?!

A few weeks ago I was traipsing across Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, when a stain in the road caught my eye:

Roadside osteology. The intersection of the trunk and legs at the intersection of Abay & Seifullin?

It’s obviously iliac but it’s not just any old ilium. I think I discovered the underreported antimere of the Ardipithecus ramidus pelvis (ARA-VP 6/500; Lovejoy et al., 2009). What it’s doing in Almaty, and in the middle of a busy street, I have no idea. I’ve long thought the absence of hominin fossils in Kazakhstan was suspicious. But not this suspicious.

The Ardi innominate pictured (center, above) is from the left side, and the Almaty intersection innominate is a perfect counterpart from the right. Yes, I know they found a right ilium at Aramis to go with the better preserved left half. But to that I reply:

Let’s compare the “true” right ilium from Aramis (left, below) with my more likely antimere (right). Look how perfectly the Almaty Ardi fits the reconstruction:

The lower portion of the ilium is a bit taller than in later hominins, what’s preserved of the acetabulum is a bit small, and there’s a beautiful portion of the auricular surface for articulation with the (never recovered) sacrum. I rest my case.

Despite their strange shapes, pelvicparts seem to be the epitome of “osteology everywhere.”